In a rural settlement 20 miles or so from Tuskegee in east-central Alabama [they] found him - the man Theodore Rosengarten calls Nate Shaw - a black man, 84 years old, in full possession of every moment of his life and every facet of its meaning...Theodore Rosengarten...had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who could neither read nor write but who sensed that the substance of his own life, and a million other black lives like his, were the very fiber of the nation's history."--BOOK JACKET.